Successful Blog

Why Businesses Still Aren’t Engaging Online With Their Customers

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A Guest Post by Frank Angelone

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Are you a business? Whether you are a large corporation or a small business, you should be engaging with your customers. As many already know, the best way to engage with your customers is through social media. There are so many sites available at your disposal to be an active participant, yet many businesses still aren’t using social media to its full potential.

Why is this? Well, I believe it can be answered in 5 bullet points…

  1. Laziness. It’s as simple as that. If you don’t engage in social media, your sales for your business aren’t going to be as high as Toyota who are actively engaging with their customers. Don’t sit around and wait for social media to come to you. You have to go after your customer base and see what they want. If you don’t, you are leaving money on the table for your competition.
  2. Time Constraints. So many businesses say they are too busy to create accounts on Twitter or Facebook. That’s a poor excuse and a simple solution is hire someone to engage with your customers.
  3. Unfamiliar with social media. This is probably the worst reason for not engaging with your customers online. If you know how to talk to your customers in person, then online interaction isn’t any different. You reach an even larger customer base online. If a business says, “We are unfamiliar with using social media.” My response is, “how come Toyota can do it?” Everyone starts at the bottom and learns more as they participate.
  4. Fear of the unknown. To many business engaging with their customers online is a new form of business that older business owners simply won’t understand its benefit. An easy fix, just do it! The more a business puts off engaging with their customers, the quicker someone will take those customers from them.
  5. Pride. There are many business owners and companies out there that feel the way that they do things is the only way it can be done. The minute you let pride get in the way, the sooner you will be bankrupt. You need to accept that the business world is always changing and if you are not willing to adapt because of pride, then get out the playing field. There are plenty of other businesses that will put int the time to make their companies better.

My takeaways for companies refusing to engage with their customers online are…

  • Business in general is bigger than YOUR company. You need to adapt to changing times to be a big player.
  • Engaging in an online capacity is the same as in person. The two shouldn’t be mistaken as different and the same amount of effort should be put into both.
  • For your company to survive, you NEED customers. Treat your customers as your number one concern and you will see your profits increase. Always build trust and relationships with those people.

Find the social site where your customers hang out. Set a goal. Invest a little time. Learn a tool. Get familiar with what’s going on… Chances are you’ll find yourself proudly connecting to the people who love what you more and more.

—–
Frank Angelone is the founder of Social Tech Zone. He helps individuals and businesses with news and tips to better themselves in social media and technology. Frank is also the author of the Computer Speed Blueprint where he helps PC users increase the speed of their slow computer. You’ll find him on Twitter as @FrankAngelone.

Thanks, Frank! Great information on how we do more than survive. 🙂

–ME “Liz” Strauss
Work with Liz on your business!!

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Social Media BookList: Let’s Talk Business, Tweets and Mojo

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A Weekly Series by Teresa Morrow

I’m Teresa Morrow, Founder of Key Business Partners, LLC and I work with authors, writers, speakers and coaches. As part of my job I read a lot of books. I am here to offer a weekly post about one that I am working with and one I have put on my reading list. The books will cover topics such as social media (Facebook & Twitter), organization, career building, networking, writing and self development and inspiration.

#MOJOtweet

This week I would like to start with a book I’ve read and working with by Marshall Goldsmith, author of #MOJOtweet published by ThinkAha books.

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In this fast paced world we live in and the need for great information that will lead us to action, is sometimes hard to find. Well, in the ThinkAha book series, this problem is quickly resolved by the format used.

#MOJOtweet is written in the template of around only 100 pages and formulated about tweets (also known as AHA’s) in 140 characters. 

You may be asking what is Mojo? Mojo is the moment when you do something that’s purposeful, powerful and positive and the rest of the world recognizes it.

Mitchell Levy, CEO of Happy About, Inc. and publisher of ThinkAha books,  summarizes the essence of the book in the forward, ” Mojo is that missing ingredient that is between you and your life filled with meaning and happiness. #Mojotweet provides that in bite-sized packages.”

Below are just a few of the wise, helpful and inspirational aha’s I found in the this informational compact book, #MOJOtweet.

~ We run everything through two filters: short-term satisfaction (or happiness) and long-term satisfaction (meaning). –>So true! When I first read that I thought, “no I don’t do that”, but when I thought about it again, I realized I certainly do.

~ Mojo is infectious. When people pass their positive spirit onto us; we feel like passing it back. –>Again, great insight in such a short statement. Positive breeds positive. If I am around a positive person, my outlook will change for the better which I will radiate to others around me.

~ When measuring your Mojo, do so in the immediate present, not in the recent past or vague future.–>this is something I struggle with sometimes. I worry about things from the past or worry how to correct things before they even get here…not to concentrate on what is in the now.

You can order your copy or download the ebook of #MOJOtweet.

Marshall Goldsmith, is America’s preeminent executive coach. He is among a select few consultants who have been asked to work with more than sixty CEOs. His clients have included many of the world’s leading corporations. Goldsmith has helped to implement leadership development processes that have impacted more than one million people around the world.

He has a Ph.D. from UCLA and is on the faculty of the executive education programs for Dartmouth College and the University of Michigan. The American Management Association recently named him as one of fifty great thinkers and business leaders of the past eighty years. Read more in his new book, MOJO: How to Get It, How to Keep It, How to Get It Back if You Lose It.

Crowdsourcing

The book on this week’s on my reading list is
Crowdsourcing: Why the Power of a Crowd is driving the future of business by Jeff Howe.

The book focuses on describing how to crowds are creating new sources of value than the specific ways to tap into that value. Chapters 1 through 5, the first half of the book, concentrates on providing examples of the crowd sourcing phenomenon. The second half focuses down on the impact of crowds to economic and business organization.

My thoughts: I believe there has always been an influence of the crowd.I remember when my mother would call her friends for advice or ideas for a new recipe, how to decorate, or who her friend used as a dentist. Society has drawn about the advice and influence of others (the crowd) for many years, however, I believe with the invasion of social media such as Twitter and Facebook, the importance of the crowd (crowdsourcing) is stronger than ever.

Jeff Howe is a contributing editor at Wired Magazine, where he covers the media and entertainment industry, among other subjects. In June of 2006 he published “The Rise of Crowdsourcing” in Wired. He has continued to cover the phenomenon in his blog, crowdsourcing.com, and published a book on the subject for Crown Books in September 2008. Before coming to Wired he was a senior editor at Inside.com and a writer at the Village Voice. In his fifteen years as a journalist he has traveled around the world working on stories ranging from the impending water crisis in Central Asia to the implications of gene patenting. He has written for Time Magazine, U.S. News & World Report, The Washington Post, Mother Jones and numerous other publications. He lives in Brooklyn with his wife, Alysia Abbott, their daughter Annabel Rose and son Phineas and a miniature black lab named Clementine.

You can pick up your copy of Crowdsourcing on Amazon.

I hope you have enjoyed this new weekly blog post. Feel free to share your thoughts with me as I would be open to read them.

Check Out GizaPage! Bring Facebook and Twitter Fans Back Home to YOU

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Yesterday I got a chance to try out a new white label social media hub for brands and bloggers. It took me seconds to click a link and sign in.

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A click through and I was here. In seconds, I could access my social profiles from one page.

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But that’s not what makes it cool.

GizaPage lets fans engage across all social media profiles from within the brand’s or blogger’s website.

Direct-To-Profile GizaLinks allow a brand or a blogger to send fans directly into their various social profiles without ever leaving their own website.

For example, consider the Smithsonian Museum of Natural History – An original Facebook link on Smithsonian’s homepage would direct the fans away from Smithsonian’s website to http://www.facebook.com/nmnh.fanpage?ref=ts. However, with a Direct-To-Profile GizaLink, Facebook would open within Smithsonian’s own website, http://social.mnh.si.edu/facebook. The fans can then engage on Facebook, Twitter, or any of the brand’s social profiles in one unified environment.

Click this screenshot to see it live.

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And did I say that GizaPage comes with analytics?

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It’s worth checking out.

And after you try it. I’d like to know how it worked for you.

–ME “Liz” Strauss
Work with Liz on your business!!

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14 Keys to a Community that Builds Your Business for You

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Last summer at AdTech, a VP at huge corporate brand extended her arms completely — way out in front her — and used her hands to gesture as she said something close to this about her goal for building a community:

I want to build a community in which peers are talking to peers openly.

I’m sure she didn’t mean it the way it looked … Her hands were so far away from her. — or sounded … peers talking to peers?

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I couldn’t help thinking … Where will YOU be? Studying me? Is that what you think of me? I’m not a peer. I’m a person. I only do well in places where people “get” me.

Users. Consumers. Buyers. Customers. Leads. Eyeballs. Peers. Those are faceless, flattening labels. They come from the time of one-size-fits-all.

People are individual human beings complete with aspirations, intentions, ideas, opinions, habits, behaviors, thoughts, and emotions.

Which community would you join?

More Communities and More Time for Them

Online social communities aren’t a new thing. People have been linking and sharing via blogs since the 20th century. Organized social networking sites, such as Twitter, Facebook, MySpace, and LinkedIn have become a part of our lives.

Our communities are becoming more about communicating and being creative about what interests us. It’s all about making it relevant to the people we want to attract.
We’re participating more. We’re spending more time in communities. We’re building more of them. How do attract people to the communities we’re building that are perfect for them?

14 Keys to a Community that Builds Your Business for You

A building is not a business. A community is not a collection of profiles or a page on Facebook. People won’t visit our community because it’s pretty. People come because it offers them something they value.

If they value what you offer enough, those same customers will lend their heads, hearts, and hands to helping your business grow. They’ll not only help you build your business, but they’ll also protect it.

What attracts and creates a community that will do that?

From two people to more than plenty, a community is a social structure that shares personal values, cultural values, business goals, attitudes, or a world view. What binds it is a culture of social rules and group dynamics that identify members. In the most concise terms, an online social community is a group of like-minded individuals connected by relevant interactions and protected by a high-trust environment.

A high-trust community is an agreement, a pact or contract, like love or friendship. We can’t order, build, or wish our way to one. What we can do is attract people who want to join what we’re doing. The only way to do that is clear passionate commitment, obvious generosity, trustworthiness, and a touch of intentional serendipity … which looks something like this.

  1. Be a person (or people) who likes people. People work with, talk with, and relate to other people not a business.
  2. Articulate a clear and passionate vision worth investing in. Live your commitment. Get your hands dirty.
  3. Seek out people who would love what you’re doing. Find them where they are already gathering and talking. Join THEIR conversations. Get to know them.
  4. Be a beginner, but keep the vision. Learn from everyone who’s been anywhere near where you’re going. Learn to sort wrong from unexpected or different. Ideas that jar you could be the best ones.
  5. Invite everyone who “gets” the vision to help build this new thing. Look for ways to include their skills and their passions.
  6. Keep participation efficient and easy. Curb the urge to add cool things that get in the way of conversation and sharing.
  7. Let trust sort things. Model the standards of behavior. Keep rules to a minimum.
  8. Be visible authenticity. Lean toward full disclosure, but avoid over-exposure. Most of us look better with our clothes on.
  9. Protect everyone’s investment. Forgive mistakes. Ignore little missteps. Eradicate what is destructive. Know the difference by holding thing up to trust, values, and the community vision.
  10. Stop doing what isn’t working. Be lethal about keeping things easy, efficient, and meaningful.
  11. Promote your members … and honor your competition! Secure communities need both to thrive and get new ideas.
  12. Encourage mutation. Let the environment change to meet the changing needs of the people it serves.
  13. Celebrate contagion. Make it heroic to share what’s going on!
  14. Be grateful and always about the people. The community wouldn’t be a community without them.

An online community isn’t built or befriended, it’s connected by offering and accepting. Community is affinity, identity, and kinship that make room for ideas, thoughts, and solutions. What Is a Social Community?

It’s not “If You Build It, …”

We create vibrant, high trust community by letting other folks raise the barn with us, by being their first offering trust and a passionate vision, and valuing the trust and energy they give us.

It’s not if you build it, they will come. It’s if they build it, they’ll bring their friends.”

What attracts you to a community? What keeps you coming back again?

-ME “Liz” Strauss
Work with Liz on your business!!

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10 Crucial Roles of a Social Media Director

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What Sort of Expertise Does a Social Media Expert Need?

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Social Media Marketing budgets are on the rise. It’s been said that as many as 86% of Companies are planning a Social Media Marketing Bump this year. And social media job listings aren’t so hard to find anymore.

In 2010, a new job role of Social Media Director became quite the thing. It was given many names and a wide range of job descriptions. Although on a whole we humans have gotten good at being social, those in social media roles need more than expertise with online tools to lead a company’s direction successful on the social web.

Now, years later, we realize that any role on a social media team is about change: changing relationships, changing technology and change management in times of every more rapid change.

10 Crucial Roles of a Social Media Director

Macro and micro businesses get stuck in process models that they’ve outgrown, but keep using. Fear of change, love of past success, bias that interprets history in our favor leads us to repeat and re-imprint bad or outdated behaviors in our organizational brains.

To pull that off, a social media director needs to be role model, leader, learner, teacher, guide, friend, entrepreneur, but even more than that. If you want a company to embrace the social web, champion these ten roles as an action plan …

  1. be a role model … listen first; communicate authentically; don’t control the conversation (and choose wisely those you refer)
  2. become a fan … fall in love with the brand and its customers to protect its heritage and legacy
  3. be a follower … get to know the people who work there to find the champions and learn how the culture moves, learns, and thinks
  4. be about ROI …. study the business to protect it financially
  5. be a connector … work toward open silos so they communicate internally at light speed
  6. be inclusive … enlist marketing and PR to help build a strong, consistently authentic voice between the business and its customers
  7. be strategic … write a strategic plan of goals and measurements based on customers that naturally support growing product offers, strategic relationships, and the customer base
  8. be focused … choose online tools, tests, and tactics after you have the goals
  9. be innovative … integrate social business online and off
  10. be a community builder … make it look easy, fun, and meaningful

If you look inside those ten points you’ll see that the job really calls for about ten roles — strategist, change manager, brand manager, a marketing manager, a community builder, a campaign manager, a cheerleader, a business developer, a corporate trainer, and a social media professional who can use quantifiable social media data, tools, and measurements.

Last night, 1700+ Retweeted a Mashable Post about the 15,740 social media experts on Twitter. I can’t help but wonder whether all 15,740 are up to all ten of them.

Bet you see even more roles and action steps that I’ve left out. I’d love you to add your additions here.

–ME “Liz” Strauss
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Word of Mouth and Social Media Aren't the Same …

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But You Already Knew That!

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My son is an introvert. He thinks long before he talks and rarely wastes words. He’s not one to volunteer extraneous information. Ask a question and you’ll get exactly the answer it takes to fulfill your request. Some days that makes conversation a bit of a challenge. A digital native by age, birth, and technological era, he would never be a social media maven. It’s just not his personality or his inclination.

However, if you get him talking about something he believes in, he’ll tell you exactly why and how you should be participating. Then he’ll tell the person sitting next to you, if he thinks that person might listen. If he knows how to do something faster, make something easier, or has an insight into something more meaningful, he’ll share it because it feels good to do so.

That’s the definition of a word-of-mouth natural. It’s not promoting. It’s sharing what we care about with the people we care about.

World of Mouth and Social Media Aren’t the Same Thing

Recently, Andy Sernovitz and I were talking via email about his new SuperGenius Word of Mouth Conference on December 16th in Chicago. He made some great points worth sharing about the difference between social media and word-of-mouth marketing.

Social media is an incredible tool. But social media is not word of mouth marketing. It’s a tool we can use for the online portion of word of mouth. But it’s not even the main tool there. I would argue that more recommendations go by plain old-fashioned email than all the social networks combined.

On top of that, offline word of mouth is so much bigger than online word of mouth. A tweet still doesn’t beat a personal recommendation from a close friend.

So why are we talking about social media so much?

1. Because real word of mouth is hard. It requires big ideas, long-term commitment, and an honest dedication by a company to earn the respect and recommendation of its customers. You can’t just call your agency and order up some WOM.

2. Because social media gives us an action step. It’s fairly straightforward to do a campaign on Facebook or Twitter. You can call your agency and order up a social media campaign. And your agency, who is totally freaked out by this WOM stuff, can deliver a pretty good campaign. Then you can show the results to your happy boss. Everyone feels good and gets paid.

Except… we completely miss the point.

The point of word of mouth isn’t ecommerce; it isn’t to count clicks and CPAs.

The point of word of mouth is to be a brand worth talking about. To be a company that people are proud to tell their friends about. It’s to replace paid marketing with personal connections. To replace cash with love. To be fantastic.

And that’s what this conference is all about: A revival of TRUE WOM. A home for the simple idea that HAPPY CUSTOMERS ARE YOUR BEST ADVERTISERS.

True WOM is a movement.

Andy didn’t ask me to share what he said, but I agree with every point he made here and I wanted to pass it on.
He offered me a discount seat at the conference and he offered a scholarship code for my readers.

Learn How to Be Great at Word of Mouth Marketing An incredible word of mouth marketing conference. Learn to get more people talking about you the very next day. 12 How-To Classes, 12 Case Studies, 6 Authors Word of Mouth Supergenius! Chicago, December 16

Register here: http://gaspedal.com/supergenius Use the code VIPSUCCESSFULBLOG for a discount of $144.

Andy wrote the book on Word of Mouth Marketing. No, I’m not an affiliate. I think it’s important that we know everything we can about getting folks to talk about the good things we have going on.

–ME “Liz” Strauss
Work with Liz on your business!!

Buy the ebook. Learn the art of online conversation.

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